Last week a JBHE post reported on an increase in Black first-year applicants to the nine undergraduate campus of the University of California. But there is another part of the story.

Each year, there is a large group of students who earned associate’s degree’s at California community colleges who seek to transfer to four-year bachelor’s degree programs at one of the University of California campuses. This year, the University of California system received 34,347 transfer applicants who listed a California community college as the last school they attended.

Of these 34,347 transfer applicants, 1,912 were African Americans. Thus, Blacks made up 5.6 percent of the transfer applicant pool. In contrast, Blacks were 6.1 percent of all first-year applicants from the state of California. The number of Black transfer applicants was up more than 9 percent from a year ago, while the number of overall transfer applicants was up by 6.9 percent.

Large numbers of these students seeking to transfer into the University of California system from a California community college apply to several campuses. Eight of the nine undergraduate campuses received more than 10,000 transfer applications. The University of California, Los Angeles, received 1,116 transfer applications from African Americans. Thus, nearly 60 percent of all Black transfer applicants applied to UCLA.

Seven of the other eight undergraduate campuses each received more than 500 transfer applications from African Americans. At the University of California, Riverside, Blacks made up 6.4 percent of all transfer applicants, the highest percentage in the university system. At the University of California, Santa Barbara, the 707 Black transfer applicants were 4.4 percent of the total, the lowest percentage among the nine undergraduate campuses.

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